The Royal Court's series of 50 rehearsed readings of key plays from its past offers the best value in London. For as little as a fiver you get a different play each night, top-line casts and an extraordinary glimpse not only of theatrical history but of the fabric of British life.

Barry Reckord's Skyvers, first seen in 1963, is a case in point. This is a devastating account by a young Jamaican writer of life in what would now be called a "bog-standard" London comprehensive. The kids themselves, about to leave school at 15 with minimal qualifications, are chippy, resentful and contemptuous of education. As they cruelly point out to a teacher, "Where did it get you?" And Cragge, the one boy who tries to escape the nihilist ethos by doing a bit of sports reporting, ends up rejected by his mates and implicated in hooliganism by the headmaster.

Other dramatists, such as Nigel Williams in Class Enemy, went on to explore the failure of the system to cope with those at the bottom of the heap. But Reckord got there first and, while it is tempting to say times have changed, new figures show that up to 16m adults today have the reading and writing skills of primary-school children. Pam Brighton's production, more a mini-staging than a reading, also vividly captures the mutinous surliness of kids for whom school is little more than a prison. OT Fagbenle as the isolated Cragge, Fraser Ayres as the charismatic gang-leader and William Hoyland as the patronising headmaster are first-rate in a piece that proves the best drama offers vital social evidence.

A Pinter double bill of The Room and The Dumb Waiter, well revived by Harry Burton, also proves more than a demonstration of technical skill. Everyone bangs on about Pinter's mystery. But Rose, the immured heroine of The Room, perfectly embodies a particularly working-class xenophobic isolation. Beautifully played by Sian Thomas, forever shielding herself in her shawl, she embodies the truculent nervousness of little Britain in the late 1950s. Even The Dumb Waiter gains political resonance from the casting of two Irish actors, Stanley Townsend and Fintan McKeown, as the hit men waiting to carry out a contract killing. You are constantly reminded that, while perpetrators of violence, they themselves are victims of a murderous hierarchy. But what these readings confirm is that the Royal Court's vast back catalogue is a form of living history.